ARORA & NavSim: a simulator system for training autonomous agents with geospecific data

Abstract

This study accompanies the initial public release of the software for ARORA, or A Realistic Open environment for Rapid Agent training, and marks a high point of several years of work for the mature and completely open ARORA simulator. The purpose of ARORA is to support the training of an autonomous agent for tasks associated with a large-scale and geospecific outdoor urban environment, including the task of navigation as a car. The study elaborates on the simulator's architecture, agent, and environment. For the environment, ARORA provides an improvement on similar simulators through an unconstrained geospecific environment with detailed semantic annotation. The agent is represented as a car available with four different options of physics fidelity. The agent also has sensors available: a pose sensor, a camera sensor, and a set of three proximity sensors. Future use cases from training extend to both civilians and militaries (including human training and wargaming), in terms of training autonomous agents in outdoor urban environments. The study also presents a brief description of NavSim, a Python-based companion tool. The purpose of NavSim is to connect to ARORA (or any other similar simulator) and train an agent using reinforcement-learning algorithms. The study also provides challenges in development and subsequent work-arounds and solutions. The goal of the ARORA & NavSim system is to provide communities with a high-fidelity, publicly available, free, and open-source system for training an autonomous agent as a car.